Iceberg Collapses and Flips over in Ilulissat, Greenland (July 25, 2026) [video]

178

BBender about 4 hours ago 44 commentsRead Article on youtube.com

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Discussion (44 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

ilamont•6 minutes ago

Can more experienced people describe how to verify this video as non-AI generated? Is there a scientific source in Greenland or Denmark that tracks such incidents? Or could satellite passes before vs after confirm what happened?

atbpaca•about 3 hours ago

Beautiful and scary at the same time. Almost like the iceberg was a planet on its own with mountains, valleys, crevices. Then everything goes haywire. The fall of a majestic titan. The destruction of a world.

baubino•about 2 hours ago

There’s also something very organic about it. I had to keep reminding myself that it’s “just ice” and not a living being.

dotancohen•about 1 hour ago

Especially the spine. If you had shown me a portion of the video with that thing moving as such, I would have believed it to be some leviathan.

Which brings us to the video itself - horrible. Presumably the original sound was recorded, because we hear it under the music. Just let us hear the sound! The people watching this video are people who appreciate nature, not people who need a dramatic soundtrack to be entertained.

And what is with changing the speed of the video every 60 seconds? Either show it at real speed, or speed it up, but not both intermittently! At first I thought there was an issue with the video playback hanging.

I would absolutely love to watch the original, unedited source.

artine•about 1 hour ago

> I would absolutely love to watch the original, unedited source.

From the linked video's info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ5PhjFYRSo

GuB-42•about 3 hours ago

In short, a titanic event...

joshuat•about 3 hours ago

Massive appreciation for whoever adjusted the position of the camera at 7:23 (3:18 in video)

Jeremy1026•28 minutes ago

Nice of the iceberg to float into frame before decided to do it's gymnastics routine.

nomilk•about 3 hours ago

Surprised the bottom of the iceberg crumbled so easily (like sand) at 4m 16s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UufMqwyO7pY&t=4m16s

I'd have assumed it would be colder and more compacted (being toward the bottom and further under water), and therefore harder.

amszmidt•about 3 hours ago

How cold is cold? :-)

Water below ”sea” level tends to stay around -1C (salt water) to 4C. Below that, water becomes ice…

Ambient temperature can drop to -40C … internally these ice blocks hoover around -10C.

FromHoiPolloi•about 3 hours ago

My take would be that underwater temps cannot get below freezing. So the surrounding temperatures above water can be lower than under water.

Pooge•about 2 hours ago

> My take would be that underwater temps cannot get below freezing

Yep, density of water changes with temperature—it's the only thing that has that phenomenon—and therefore the colder water is always at the surface. That's actually what made life possible since life could survive despite a frozen surface.

Happy to be proven wrong, but that's what I learnt making cocktails and investigating clear ice :)

dotancohen•about 1 hour ago

Lots of things change density when temperature changes. Water is unique that below 4°C, it gets less dense as it cools - and that trend continues even through the phase change. That's why, as you mention, ice floats, and the surface freezes first, and fish can live below a frozen surface.

nh23423fefe•about 3 hours ago

plus thermal conductivity of water vs atmosphere

mrloopex•about 3 hours ago

Freezing point of water changes with salinity and impurities. By definition a liquid cannot be below its freezing point until it has completed its phase change.

FromHoiPolloi•about 2 hours ago

Yes. My point was that it's easier(?) to get below freezing point above water than below. So while the cold air keeps the upper part of the iceberg (relatively) intact - it will slowly melt below the sea until the center of gravity changes enough to flip over.

raphinou•about 3 hours ago

I would have thought it would generate enormous wave, but that's clearly not the case. I think some of the biggest waves was generated by a mountain sliding or collapsing in the sea. I expected something similar here. Anyone know why not?

GuB-42•about 3 hours ago

It is not a very energetic event for its size. The iceberg is floating, it can't accumulate a lot of potential energy before flipping, so when it happens, there is not enough to make big waves. The center of gravity of the iceberg barely moves.

A mountain sliding into the sea is different, these higher up rocks have a lot of potential energy, that convert into kinetic energy as they fall, which is transferred to the water as they splash down, making big waves.

cucumber3732842•about 3 hours ago

The amount of water actually being displaced isn't changing much, it's just kind of rearranging around where is water and where is ice.

javier2•about 3 hours ago

i suppose its not actually displacing a lot of water volume, unlike a landslide.

staplers•about 3 hours ago

All its mass is already on the water so it's not displacing anything. It probably made some splashes but it seems like a fairly round object rotating rather than smashing into anything

dist-epoch•about 3 hours ago

Maybe because ice floats, and it's almost the same density as water?

tristramb•25 minutes ago

Reminds me of a 'mimoid' from Stanisław Lem's Solaris.

eamag•about 4 hours ago

Crazy how the most liked comment under the video as of now discusses AI video generation

saalweachter•about 2 hours ago

The music also gets talked about quite a bit.

My immediate reaction to a "what is with this loud music, I can barely hear the actual audio" comment on YouTube was to assume the channel was afraid of being copystruck by the iceberg's lawyers.

maxlin•about 3 hours ago

Especially as physics-oriented and long videos are exactly the kinds that are easiest to figure if they're AI.

Artificial Intelligence isn't the issue. Natural Stupidity is.

hk__2•about 3 hours ago

I felt like watching a big animal moving

troyvit•about 2 hours ago

Yeah there were parts that were so organic it looked alive. I was imagining the folks at Toho taking detailed notes.

xnx•about 2 hours ago

Anyone who enjoys that video (I did!) should watch the largest glacier calving ever recorded: https://youtu.be/hC3VTgIPoGU

quercusa•about 1 hour ago

A fun game to draw your own iceberg: https://joshdata.me/iceberger.html

First seen https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26201160

thisisauserid•about 4 hours ago

It stops first? Maybe the bottom hit the seafloor?

dotancohen•about 1 hour ago

That's what I thought too. The sudden stop is actually two phenomenon compounded. One, the mountain of ice contacts bottom. Two, the video speed changes from ~8x to 1x.

readthenotes1•about 3 hours ago

One of the comments said just that. "Grounded near disko bay" iirc.

Another comment said that icebergs melt blow water faster than in the air and that flipping is a fairly common thing to do because the center of gravity changes.

maxbond•about 3 hours ago

You can see bathtub rings on the underside as it's lifted up. The rings are caused by it's melting faster under the water than in the air, so there's a discontinuity at the waterline.

pixl97•about 3 hours ago

4:40, so this is where people came up with the idea for Godzilla.

jcranmer•about 3 hours ago

Honestly, my first thought watching this video is "I want a root beer float." Something in the way the icefalls as the iceberg is flipping over just makes me think of that...

csnizik•about 3 hours ago

Structural review clearly got skipped. Somebody is losing their job over this.

catlikesshrimp•about 4 hours ago

I would have described flipping it over before collapsing. The title seems a clickbait, but is no quite that. Keep in mind that most of the iceberg is off camera, as shown during the first minutes. It lost 80% or 90% of its total mass but most of it isn't seen until the end, when the iceberg goes back to the right.

rlam2x51•about 3 hours ago

I was expecting more waves. I am wondering if this video was AI generated. I hate that it is so hard to trust your eyes nowadays…

Edit: Did a quick background check, video seems legit.

nh23423fefe•about 3 hours ago

immediate ban

maxlin•about 3 hours ago

now that's epic!